"1)Increased smoothness of the river coasts and, also smoother whitecaps (foam) on the waves. Smooth foam works only for nVidia cards in the mode
water=2. "
Perhaps this is a miss-print. Water=2 for Nvidia cards has whitecaps disabled by default. Water=4 is the one that has the whitecaps.
And with a quad core + 8800GT 640mb + 2gb ram I get 20% less frames plus dirty brown coastlines in the mid to long distance where I would normally see white sands. 15th feb. dll's were better methinks.